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(AP File Photo)

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, former domestic terrorist-turned university professor Bill Ayers was asked how the bombings he helped organize with the Weather Underground decades ago are any different than what happened in Boston.

“How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” the Weather Underground co-founder reportedly replied. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.”

Ayers was a keynote speaker at the commemoration of the National Guard shootings at Kent State this weekend, and was asked the question after his remarks.

The Beacon Journal’s Jim Mackinnon continues:

The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence.”

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.” [Emphasis added]

This isn’t the first time Ayers has defended his role in the Weather Underground. In 2001 he said: “I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain noted President Obama’s connections to the radical in their presidential campaigns.

The Beacon Journal has more on Ayers’ remarks. Apparently he continued to attack John McCain, and spoke of the three friends he lost:

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.

Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.

“No one knows for sure but I think they were. And had they carried it out it would have been a catastrophe,” Ayers said. “But they didn’t and it didn’t happen. But what did happen is, on that same day John McCain murdered civilians. Do we have any responsibility for that? Should there be any reconciliation for that? Should he tell the truth about it?” [Emphasis added]